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Gaza’s Gordian Knot (Seth J. Frantzman, National Interest)
Israel has been there before. While Israel once administered the Gaza Strip after the 1967 war, it evacuated Jewish communities there in 2005. Hamas came to power over the next two years, ejecting the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority from Gaza. In the wake of this rout, Washington invested in the Palestinian Authority Security Forces. However, the PA has faced numerous challenges controlling the West Bank over the last sixteen years. Over the previous year, Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad has been able to destabilize Jenin, a city in the northern West Bank. Israel frequently clashes with terror groups in Nablus and Tulkarm, two other cities in the northern West Bank.
What this illustrates is that even if Hamas is defeated in Gaza, it remains to be seen if the Palestinian Authority can exercise control over Gaza. In any case, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the idea that the current leadership of the Palestinian Authority will rule Gaza after Hamas. The aging and ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas will not likely take control of Gaza. Members of Abbas’ Fatah party have also shown that they can’t get along with Israel in a framework that would work in Gaza. For example, Fatah official Jabril Rajoub excused the Hamas October 7 attack. Israel won’t accept officials running Gaza who support the attack that killed 1,200 people.
Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, and the War on Hamas (Hector Schamis, National Interest)
We hear it so often that it sounds routine. “I am not an anti-Semite. I am an anti-Zionist,” the occasional anti-Semite confesses with astonishing candor. Such openness reveals the speaker’s ignorance about their own racism, a prejudice lodged in their unconscious though quite close to the surface. Or they do know it, and the discursive alibi is meant to hide it.
It is not coincidental. Jihadist fundamentalists use the term “Zionist” as a disqualification towards Israelis and Jews in general. It is always the Zionist aggressor, the Zionist invader, the Zionist occupier. Zionists or not, since, in the strict sense of the term, not all Jews are Zionists, the real problem they have is the Jews. And this is the debate of our times, yet again.
“Anti-Zionism” is racism, as it challenges the right of a people to have their own state, for which it is necessary to dissolve their identity, the Jewish identity. As an intellectual operation, this also implies ignoring reality, that is, denying the existence of what has existed for seventy-five years, the State of Israel, or worse still, proposing its elimination.
Western sympathizers of Hamas do exactly that when they repeat, “From the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea, Palestine will be free.” They associate themselves with a project of obliteration of what remains in between, the State of Israel. This necessarily implies the extermination of its population, a genocidal project whose most explicit notice, but not the first, is dated October 7, 2023.
US, Partners Announce Task Force to Counter Flow of Money to Hamas (Reuters / VOA News)
The U.S. said Monday that after Hamas’ assault on Israel last month, it and several allied nations established an international task force aimed at countering the flow of money to the militant Palestinian group and supporting anti-terrorism efforts.
Since 1,200 people were killed in the October 7 attack, the U.S., U.K. and allies have sought to cut off funding for Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist group by Washington and other governments.
The Israel-Hamas War Has Upended the Terrorist Threat Matrix (Brian Michael Jenkins, The Hill)
As with past conflicts in the Middle East, the current fighting in Gaza may well provoke terrorist repercussions beyond the region. The magnitude and shape of the terrorist threat depends on the course of the conflict: How long it lasts. Whether external parties — Hezbollah or Iran — decide on full-scale intervention, or Israel launches a preemptive attack to prevent them from doing so. Whether America is drawn further into the fight.
The global jihadist movement has proven to be resilient and opportunistic. In 2011, it was hunkered down but then quickly exploited the Arab Spring to make a dramatic comeback, drawing a new wave of foreign volunteers to Syria.
The Israel-Hamas war may offer jihadist groups another opportunity similar to 2011. That, or the war could attract restive extremists to new terrorist formations and create a new situation they can capitalize on to advance their own banners.
Hezbollah, which emerged with Iran’s guidance and support in Lebanon in the 1980s, has American blood on its hands. It is now a powerful sub-state actor, with a battle-hardened army and a vast arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles. An all-out Hezbollah assault on Israel could result in the kind of destruction seen in Ukraine and possibly provoke a U.S. intervention.